Plan to Create a Digital Works Institute Wins Ad Contest

The winning idea in MDC Partners’ “Million-Dollar Challenge” is to form a national institute that would be focused on education in the realm of digital arts and sciences.

STUART ELLIOTT

AN advertising contest with a $1 million prize has ended with an unexpected winner.

The contest was sponsored by MDC Partners, the holding company based in Toronto that owns all or part of agencies like Anomaly, 72 and Sunny, Crispin Porter & Bogusky and Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners. The contest, announced in June, was called the Million-Dollar Challenge; the initials, not coincidentally, spell “MDC.”

The contest encouraged would-be entrepreneurs and other “people with dreams” to submit plans to start up agencies in any area of marketing communications. Judges would review the entries and choose at least one winning plan from among a group of finalists, to be followed by MDC’s investing the $1 million to open the agency in exchange for a 51 percent share of the new venture.

But as it turned out, the winning entry, to be formally announced on Monday, does not call for starting an agency. Rather, the idea, submitted by Kip Voytek, a specialist in interactive advertising, is to form a national institute that would be focused on education in the realm of digital arts and sciences.

And because the Digital Works Institute, as it is being named, will be a nonprofit organization rather than a profit-making agency, MDC will take no stake in it.

“This is the idea that’s the most sure thing, even though it’s not a new business for us,” said Chuck Porter, the chief strategist at MDC who is also the chairman at Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

“MDC gets zero percent, but gets to bask in the prestige,” he added, laughing.

Mr. Porter was among the MDC executives involved in the judging. The others included Miles S. Nadal, chairman and chief executive, and Rob Dickson, managing director.

Many of the more than 200 submissions were “ ‘me too,’ derivative, not innovative enough,” Mr. Porter said. “You’d look and say, ‘Three different people are doing this already.’ ”

“And an awful lot of them were from junior creatives who are talented people but maybe didn’t have the experience or credentials or gravitas we were looking for,” he added. “It’s what I would have done when I was 26, but in our judgment they felt like too much of a long shot.”

By comparison, Mr. Porter said, the proposal from Mr. Voytek was appealing because “he’s got big plans and believes there is a place in this industry for a thought-leadership center, a center for learning and thinking.”

The institute will be incorporated in New York, where Mr. Voytek lives. But “it will be very virtual,” Mr. Voytek said, in keeping with its digital nature.

To start the institute, Mr. Voytek, who is 45, is leaving his job as a senior vice president for communications planning at Rapp, an agency owned by the Omnicom Group. Other agencies for which he has worked include Digitas and R/GA; before that, he designed Web sites and games.

“My job is to make sure the institute doesn’t cost more than a million dollars,” Mr. Voytek said, “and it becomes self-funding” through the workshops, classes and other educational programs it will offer.

Mr. Voytek is also an adviser to and teacher at Boulder Digital Works, a graduate program at the University of Colorado, Boulder that was founded with the assistance, financial and otherwise, of Crispin Porter & Bogusky. (The agency has dual headquarters in Boulder and Miami.)

Mr. Voytek said those ties to an agency owned by MDC did not give him an advantage in the contest.

“I think I had leg irons instead of a leg up,” Mr. Voytek said, because his submission seemed “out of sync” with what the contest was seeking in that he did not suggest “opening an agency, getting clients.”

Mr. Voytek said he entered the contest anyway because “a big part of the Million-Dollar Challenge was how do you spark talent,” which is the principal goal of the institute.

Mr. Porter said that MDC executives hoped to open two additional institutes in the next 24 months, “one more in the U.S., on the East Coast, and another one in Canada.”

And “there may be another winner” in the contest to be named in the spring, Mr. Porter said, “more along the lines of what we had in mind in the first place”— meaning, a profit-making agency.

“We always said if we found two great ideas, we’d fund two,” he added.

Indeed, when MDC executives announced the contest in June, they said there would possibly be more than a single winner. “If we have five great ideas,” Mr. Nadal said, “we’ll put up $5 million.”

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